Zanna’s Miraculous Poo

Our twins’ potty training has been coming along quite nicely since we put up the Potty Tots wall chart.

For the time being, though, we’ve left out our bathroom as a place to go potty, and have set up our travel potty outside it. The rationale for doing so is because we want the girls to get used to going on their own, with no help from Mommy or Daddy. And since they need to be supervised in the bathroom still, the travel potty is the way to go. (Pun not intended)

Halle’s been getting better at this, though she still shrieks and howls every night around 3am when she first wakes up for nature’s call.

Zanna, though, sleeps like a rock. This is a problem because it’s A) Awfully hard to train someone who won’t pee at night, and B) Zanna refused to poop in the potty.

Zanna had decided that the perfect place to excrete was in diapers. During the day, she would wear panties, but she’d hold in the poo until her nighttime diaper was on, then 10 minutes later, we’d have to swap it for a new one.

She would not do it on the potty. Oh, she’d give a good show of grunting and mock straining, but nothing would come out. Then as soon as the diaper would go on – whoosh!

So we started to make a big fuss over Halle doing everything in the potty like A BIG GIRL!!
And we emphasized that she was too big for ‘yucky poopy baby diapers’.

Zanna didn’t like that one bit. Her solution? She would no longer poop in the diapers.

Of course, she was not pooping in the potty either…

What would happen then, was that after she’d gone to sleep, she’d poop in her sleep, in the diapers. Which meant that I had to wait a couple hours after she went to bed, to check if she’d done her business yet, and then try to change her in a semi-darkened room – NOT wake up her or her sister – and try to get all the muck off.

Sometimes I’d even have to change her sheets if it was a large payload and the diaper leaked.

Oh joy. What fun.

So on Father’s Day, at a church BBQ while I was running the facepainting booth and my husband was looking after the kids, Zanna had an accident.

It was bad.

She had a massive loose poop explosion – and my husband had to clean her up! On Father’s Day! There should be a special merit badge for this. Really.

Apparently, the whole experience was very embarrassing for Zanna, and quite unpleasant on an aesthetic level for her, as well.

The next day, nice as you please, Zanna plunked herself down on the potty and pooped.

She was so excited about this and shrieked for me to come and look. I hurrahed, cheered, gave her high-fives, and let her play with a coveted toy that I’d stored on the shelf for just such an occasion.

She enjoyed the experience so much that the next day she did it again! Halle was so impressed by her sister’s newfound pooping prowess, that she extemporaneously composed a musical ode to the poop and sang to it before we flushed it away.

Zanna is now riding high on her success, and was even able to keep her diaper dry through the night a couple times since then!

Pretty soon, we’ll be ready for the twins to dispense with the diapers altogether!